When Corregidora came out in 1975, the reviewers were unanimously enthusiastic about the quality of this short, first novel by Gayl Jones. They agreed that she writes with strength and grace, that she knows her heroine, Ursa Corregidora, from the inside out, that she uses the language of seduction and betrayal with authority and ease. Within a general area, they also agreed on the subject of the novel: Corregidora is about the struggle of a psychologically maimed woman toward some kind of sexual identity and fulfillment. 1 would like to disagree-not with the high praise Corregidora has received, but with the consensus that the novel primarily explores black female To see Corregidora as basically about the pain of being female and is like seeing Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as being basically about the pain of being male, white, and Irish. A Portrait of the Artist is indeed a study of maleness, whiteness, Irishness, and also a study of the Catholic Church, sex, poverty, Eileen, adolescence, mothers, fathers, friends. But all of those subjects are counterbalanced by another: the growth of the artist. The tension Joyce draws between Stephen's calling and the rest of his experience provides the structure and the vision of the book. In different terms, Gayl Jones builds Corregidora on the same central tension. The novel opens with Ursa Corregidora, a blues singer from Kentucky, recounting the beginning and end of her brief marriage to Mutt Thomas twenty-two years before. Although he had first seen Ursa singing at Happy's Cafe, although he had fallen in love with her there, once they were married Mutt wanted her off the stage, singing to no one but him. Ursa refused: I said didn't just sing to be supported. said sang because it was something had to do (p. 1). He wheedled, insulted, sulked, raged, and then one night, drunk and furious, shoved her down the stairs that led out of Happy's to the alley behind. In the hospital, Ursa aborted the fetus she was carrying and lost the possibility of ever conceiving another. Ursa intends never to see Mutt again. From this scene of hatred and loss, Ursa moves her tale backward and forward in time. She swings back to her childhood and the rocking chair stories her Great Gram, Gram, and Mama told and retold of Corregidora, the violent Portuguese slave owner who had fathered both her grandmother and mother. Her own father, Martin, left when Ursa was still a baby. The burden of those rocking chair stories was always the same: you got to make generations, Ursa, in order to carry on the tale of Corregidora's evil. She swings forward, telling of her second, brief marriage to Tadpole McCormick, of her unadmitted desire for her sisters, Cat and Jeffy, of her years alone singing in small cafes, of her eventual return to Mutt. And the burden of her own stories is also always the same: even before the abortion, was destined to generate a different kind of living thing; create songs that tell tales richer than the evil ways of wicked old Corregidora. As the above summary may suggest, the novel is about Mutt, Tadpole, Corregidora, Cat, Jeffy, babies, Mama and Gram and Great Gram. It is about Ursa's need to come to terms with her and her family's past and her own sexuality. But again, to miss the counterweight-to miss seeing the way in which the novel is about a song woman-is to ignore the structure
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Open Access
Jun 23, 2022
Manuel Padilla Cruz 
